US Marines

The governor of Okinawa has approved controversial plans to relocate a US Marine base to a less populous area – but said he would keep pressing to move the base off the of the Japanese island altogether.

A corporal in South Korea's marine corps went on shooting rampage today, killing four fellow soldiers and wounding another on a Yellow Sea island base near the country's tense border with North Korea, officials said.

In a morning of close quarters combat in the heart of Taliban country, a Royal Marine team found themselves trapped in an ambush. Their section commander, a corporal, fell shot to the ground. Sam Alexander grabbed a heavy machine-gun and traded fire with insurgents just 15 metres away while charging forward. Running out of ammunition, he fired with his 9mm pistol until that too was spent. But he had done enough: the enemy fled.

John Gard'ner was one of the last surviving New Zealand fighter pilots who helped win the Battle of Britain. A volunteer for the RAF, he was also one of the few survivors of an early disaster of that battle, when his sluggish, single-engine Defiant aircraft was shot down by vastly superior Luftwaffe Messerschmitts over the Channel.

The US Navy has authorised its chaplains to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies on military bases once the ban on gays in the military is lifted, but some members of Congress argue the authorisation violates another federal law.

The US army private suspected of giving classified data to WikiLeaks is being moved from a Marine jail south of Washington to a state-of-the-art facility at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where Pentagon officials said more extensive mental, emotional and physical health care will be available.